Enter Our Giveaway for a Chance to Win an Advance Copy of “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose”

This April, the University of Notre Dame Press will publish We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn. For a limited time, we are giving away advance copies! Enter to win by filling out the form at the bottom of this post. This offer expires February 15th and is open to U.S. residents only.

Can’t wait to start reading? Reviewers, bookstore employees, librarians, and other members of the book industry can request a digital review copy through Edelweiss. We encourage you to leave a review if you enjoyed the book.

“The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. . . . He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient.” —Commentary

Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and—perhaps most centrally—the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.

These annotated speeches, including his timeless “Nobel Lecture” and “Harvard Address,” have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn’s sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn’s life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First CircleCancer WardThe Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and the two-volume Between Two Millstones memoirs.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn is a pianist and conductor based in New York City. The middle son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he is translator and editor of several of his father’s works in English.

“This new collection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speeches invite a new generation of students and other readers to hear his provocative and prophetic arguments on key cultural, political, literary, and moral questions.” —Matthew Lee Miller, author of The American YMCA and Russian Culture

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